This page drags some old skeletons from my closet. I graduated from high school in 1967 when the US was well into both the cold war and Vietnam. Although I should have chosen to go to college, I didn't but I didn't want to be drafted either. My choice, wise or otherwise, was to join the U.S. Air Force, which I did in the fall or '67.
After basic training at Lackland AFB in Texas (no comment), I attended 32 weeks of training at Chanute AFB in Rantoul, Illinois studying avionics, flight control and navigation systems for the Air Force's fleet of B-52's and cargo planes. I was the only graduate in my class (classes graduated weekly) to be assigned to a SAC base, Grand Forks, North Dakota, working on B-52H and KC-135 avionics.
Now, these planes had phenomenal electronics systems. They represented the perfection of World War II electronics. The B-52 used things like analog navigation computers with gimbals, gyros, and accelerometers, vacuum tube amplifiers, electric motors and phase detecting servo feedback sensors. They had an optical star tracking system for updating the inaccuracies of the mechanical stable platform navigation system. The most amazing thing about it was that I was working on these things when I was 19 years old!
I remember one day when a practice alert was called and I, for some undetermined reason, was the only one left in the autopilot shop. A call came in from the flight line for a technician and I went on the call. I had been on the flight line many times before under some pretty adverse conditions such as with -80 degree chill factors, but this was a real first for me. Every ready-to-fly B-52 on the flight line was fired up and ready to go. Eight jet engines on each plane with a dozen planes waiting to go. Service trucks and personnel all around, crew chiefs, fire trucks, you name it! And right there in the middle of this was a B-52 with a problem with the navigation system and it was my job to get him going. Right! Sure! I was a nervous wreck!
Turns out that the pilot had missed a step in the checklist and had not turned on the magnetic compass system circuit breaker. The instructors at Chanute training school had told us about this one and it came to me right away. Weren't they surprised! I got out of there as soon as I could. It took me about three minutes in all from the time I boarded the plane till I left. As I was leaving the plane, someone came up to me and pointed to a blue sedan on the ramp. "The commander would like to talk with you," he yelled to me over the scream of the jet engines. I got in the wing commander's car and explained what the problem had been and he kept me with him as the planes taxied to the runway and took off. Quite a sight and quite an experience for a 20 year-old Airman making $100.00 a month. Those were the days.
After one winter in North Dakota (the coldest winter of my life by far!) I was ready for a move. I was assigned to Carswell AFB in Fort Worth, Texas to be trained as a flight control technician for the brand-new FB-111A, SAC's new medium range supersonic bomber, intended to replace the retired B-58 delta wing bomber. The F-111 was a major departure from post WW II bomber technology. It was the first swing-wing airplane, technology later used in the B-1 bomber and the Navy F-14 Tomcat (remember Tom Cruise in Top Gun?). The list of advanced systems and capabilities of the FB-111 was quite impressive and it should have been at $15 million in 1960's currency!
Get the picture? This was quite an impressive airplane, but it was caught up in some serious controversy in Congress as it was developed and produced. Each crash was a $15 million loss and in the tight budget of the Vietnam era, each crash raised a stir. In 1970, the F-111 fleet was grounded for months as General Dynamics subjected the planes to wing stress tests.
When I arrived in Texas in May, 1969, the FB-111 was being manufactured at the General Dynamics factory just across the runway from Carswell AFB. None had yet been delivered to the Air Force. SAC was just about to rotate out Carswell's B-52's to Guam for use in Vietnam. In the '60's cold war days, the newer B-52's were being reserved for nuclear alert duty at bases like Minot, Grand Forks, Loring, etc. while the older "D" models were rotating out to Guam.
I spent one month in Carswell making up for the cold winter in North Dakota with 100 degree days and 98% humidity for a month without a drop of rain. Avionics training for the F-111 was being conducted in Denver and in June, '69 I went TDY to Denver for 10 weeks of paradise. That summer, I explored Denver, drove up Pikes Peak and drove up Mt. Evans a few times - what a trip! It was here at Lowrey AFB in Denver that I first learned digital electronics theory, things like AND gates, OR gates, and NOT gates, Boolean math and logic.
The test benches in the F-111 avionics shops were a real trip! Most benches were fed digital control programs from an Ampex digital tape drive system. This was a large, noisy, troublesome, slow, and unreliable system centrally located in the middle of our shop. The civilian engineers working to perfect the test system spent most of their time trying to get this tape drive to behave. The test benches were well equipped but mostly automated systems that tested the endurance of the technician to resist absolute boredom better than they tested the endurance of the components. The technician's job was to determine which pieces needed to be sent out to the civilian repair facilities and which were ready to be put back into service on the planes. I spent over two years in this environment.
I spent the winter of '69-'70 in Fort Worth and was transferred in '70 to Upper Heyford, England to work in the avionics shop for the F-111E, a version very similar to the FB-111A. The F-111E was an advanced medium range nuclear weapon delivery system. None had yet arrived in England when I arrived in June, 1970 and the F-111 fleet was grounded for wing stress tests. I spent 18 months in Upper Heyford exploring the English countryside, Oxford, and London. By the time I was discharged in November, 1971, the F-111E was fully deployed at Upper Heyford.
Since I left the Air Force, I have seen the FB-111 flying around Maine several times. One time I had just climbed Borestone Mountain and watched as two FB-111's flew just south of the mountain several hundred feet below the top of the mountain. It was quite a site watching the plane follow the landscape west toward Bigelow Mountain and presumably on to Plattsburgh AFB in upstate New York. One winter I worked on a house in Northeast Cary at the northern tip of Moosehead Lake. FB-111's would frequently fly over at probably around 500 feet altitude coming in from the Mount Katahdin region and heading west.
The FB-111 is now retired from the fleet although many of the airframes are still in use around the world. In 1996 I took pictures of the one that is on static display outside the gate to Plattsburgh AFB, Plattsburgh NY. This has to be the most impressive static display that I have ever seen. The airplane still has the look of a modern fighter and with the wings fully retracted, sitting on a pedestal twenty feet off the ground, it seems to be in full penetration mode. Check it out if you ever pass by Plattsburgh NY. The base, now closed, is only a few miles east of Interstate 87.
Sometimes it seems that I have spent the rest of my life recovering from my four years in the Air Force. If I had it to do all over again, I think I would have gone to college and taken my chances with the draft. I am glad that I didn't serve in Vietnam even though I wonder what the world would look like today if the U.S. had not chosen to take part in that fight. Think about it sometime. They say hindsight is 20-20, but when it comes to the war in Vietnam, I don't think anyone will ever know what would have been the result if we had not gone to war. In the four years that I was in the Air Force, America changed and there has been no going back to the way it was in 1967.
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Last Updated on January 7, 1998 by Bill Walden
